by JD Hawkins
Kayla smirks. “Sounds like it hasn’t settled for her, though. You either.”
“She thinks knowing what went wrong between us will help. If anything, it’ll only hurt more.”
I smile at Kayla, but it fades quickly, and only makes the sadness a little heavier.
“Why don’t you let her decide that? Just tell her what she wants to know if that’s what she’s really after. Lay those demons to rest, for both of you.”
I shake my head.
“Because she wants to know why I left—and I swore I wouldn’t tell. She wouldn’t like it. In fact, it might ruin her. Maybe it’s healthier for her to just hate me. God knows, I’m used to it.”
The girls laugh again and Kayla waits for them to stop before speaking again.
“Maybe not. Maybe that’s just a detail,” Kayla says. “Maybe she needs to know if it was real, that what you had was genuine. That you really loved her. Maybe that’s enough. You did love her, right?”
Of course I loved her. I never stopped.
I think it, but I don’t say it. Still, Kayla sees it in my eyes, in my silence, her face going soft and sympathetic.
“Look, Teo, you’re like a brother to me. I respect you so much. And I don’t want to tell you what to do. All I know is, it ain’t healthy to live with a bunch of loose ends. You either tie them up, or cut them off altogether. Otherwise they’ll bug you forever.”
It’s amazing what words can do. Ever since Kayla said that, I keep picturing that nagging, unresolved feeling as a dangling thread in the back of my mind, something that’s just gonna stay there until I figure out how to handle it.
The day’s busy enough to pass quickly, even with four of us in the shop. I spend most of the afternoon working on someone’s neck tatt; hard, exhausting work that needs a lot of concentration, and a lot of making the customer feel comfortable.
Ginger and Kayla playfully fight over the choice of music all day, more people drop by to hang out in the back room. By evening it’s clear that this is going to be one of those nights where the back room gets so packed that people end up standing around like it’s a house party. Folks start bringing crates of beers, and soon there’s a perpetual, changing circle of people by the back exit smoking. It’s a night where Ginger gets louder and friendlier because there are a lot of friendly faces around, and where even more people come around because Ginger’s in a loud, friendly mood.
I like these kinds of nights, even when they get rowdy enough to destroy my stuff, even when they end with fights and people regretting that they drank so much. More intimate than a bar, more spontaneous and unpredictable than a party. It feels like a place where people can relax, say dumb things and not be judged for it. A place where it doesn’t matter who you are, because if you’re here now, you’re cool. Even with the swearing and the boozing it feels compassionate, brotherly.
It feels like family—or what I presume most families feel like. A dysfunctional group of people that I didn’t necessarily choose to be here, but who I know and care deeply about anyway. But tonight—family or not—I’m just not in the mood. That hanging thread keeps me from laughing as hard as I normally would, keeps me from truly experiencing the present moment.
A song comes on the stereo—one everybody knows the words to—and even those who hate it sing along, bonded together by the sound of their own voices. That’s when I drain the rest of my beer and slip out the back.
I take a few steps away from the smokers’ group and pull out my phone. Unconsciously I navigate to Ash’s number, and just stare at it on the screen.
It’s hard to face the past. It’s hard to navigate the emotional confusion of hurting someone. It’s hard to condense seven years of baggage into words. But I tell myself I’m not doing any of that. I’m just hitting a little green button on my phone, and seeing what happens.
The phone rings as I pace beneath the night sky. The sound of my boots on the concrete, the muffled noise from inside the shop, one voice—probably Ginger’s—adlibbing a little over the chorus.
How many rings was that? I watch the shadows dance away from a passing car’s headlights. Where am I at now? A ‘really excited to speak to you’ amount of rings? Or a ‘this is an emergency and I desperately need you to pick up’ amount of rings?
It feels like forever. So much so that when the rings stop I prepare myself for the machine, the long pauses and rambling I’m about to record into it.
“Hey,” Ash says, sounding cautious and quiet.
“Hey,” I say.
And then…silence. Maybe a whole minute’s worth. No ‘are you gonna say something’s, no awkward ‘are you there?’s. Just the silence of two people on the same line, listening. As if just knowing that the space there, for us to talk, is enough, that the connection of an open phone line is all we need for now.
The things I want to say tumble over themselves in my head. ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘Are you ok?’ ‘About last night…’ ‘How are you?’ until I get to the single thing I want to say most of all.
“I wanna see you again.”
There’s a silence again before Ash speaks, and I wonder if she’s doing the same, sorting through all the things in her mind that she wants to say but can’t.
Finally, she responds. “I don’t know, Teo…”
“Could you really leave it like that? Like this?”
She’s quiet for a moment. “No…”
“I wanna see you again,” I repeat.
“Yeah,” she sighs, and it sounds like resistance is leaving her voice. “I kinda wanna see you too.”
I feel the smile stretching across my face. “You free Saturday?”
“Yeah.”
“How about the pier?”
“Oh,” Ash says, and I can hear the smile in her voice. “Sure.”
“Outside Blue Plate? Midday?”
“Sure. I’ll see you then.”
There are another few seconds of silence, of things unsaid, of that open connection, and then we say goodbye. When I look up, I see Kayla standing a few feet away, a knowing grin on her face.
“You eavesdropping on me now?” I ask, but I’m not really angry. “How long you been standing there?”
“Long enough. You taking care of those loose ends?” she shoots back.
I grin back at her. “Maybe I am.” At least, I sure hope so.
9
Ash
In front of me, beyond the street, a big, shimmering orange sun starts to sink into the Pacific. Behind me people laugh and talk with pre-food energy as they wait for their tacos and corn dogs and lemonade; couples and families walk slowly, as if they have all the time in the world, casting long, dark shadows in the waning light.
I almost didn’t come. At home, as I was getting ready, all I could think about was how Teo didn’t deserve this second chance, about how I deserved better, about how I’d spent long enough chasing my past and the last thing I needed right now was to chase even harder.
Now I’m here, though, and the soft breeze blowing through my hair is stilling my mind a little. The warm, friendly chatter of people walking past me is charging the air with a satisfying kind of electricity. The smell of the sea mixes with the smell of hot grilled food, the heat of the day calming like an exhalation, and it’s suddenly hard to think about past problems, possible futures. I’m just here, now, and I’m going to try and live in the moment.
Somebody looks at me a little too long as they pass and I realize I’m smiling. I look down, a little embarrassed, but still smiling. Teo always said I should live in the moment more.
I scan the street again, unsure of where he’s going to come from. When I do see him, it’s because he’s pretty hard to miss. He stands almost a foot taller than most people on the street, and walks with a kind of shoulder-rolling, rock star swagger that cuts him apart from anyone else around him. He’s also wearing the same kind of outfit he was wearing at the concert: Black jeans and boots, a tight white t-shirt. He wears it better than most guys in tail
or-made suits, however, and those densely-tattooed arms and narrowed eyes are accessories enough.
Suddenly I wonder what the hell I’m doing, why the hell I’m back here, meeting with him. As if he hasn’t hurt me enough, as if the argument at the gig wasn’t proof enough that he’s never going to change, that I’m never going to get the answers I want—that I need—out of him. I feel like a moth being drawn to that flickering blue flame of his eyes, burning myself, killing myself bit by bit. My own curiosity, his impossible beauty, compelling me to do the things I know aren’t good for me.
I wave at him to draw his attention, even though he’s looking right at me, and he salutes casually in response, a warm smile lighting up his already perfect face. I realize I’m smiling back twice as hard and try to stop myself by biting my lip, but it doesn’t work. I could watch him walk toward me forever. A voice in my head tells me to turn around and run away, before Teo crushes my beaten heart even more. But my body weakens, and my blood starts to thump, urging me to get close to him, to touch him, to get him somewhere and take my time tracing out the muscles of his chest…
“Hey,” I say, trying to hold back the quiver in my voice.
“Hey,” he says, his voice slow and sexy. “I’m glad you came.”
“Yeah. Well…I didn’t want to leave things like…”
I trail off, unwilling to bring up the bad taste of what happened at the gig, unable to find the words to explain the complexity of what I’m feeling. That I still hate him for holding so much back, but that I still want to know him, who he is now, and what he’s done for all these years.
“I get it,” he says. “We got off on the wrong foot. No time to breathe. We’ll take it slow this time.”
I nod, more at his calm, steady tone than the idea of just moving forward and forgetting everything that happened between us entirely. But he’s right. We should take it slow.
“Ok. What do you wanna do then?”
He shrugs. “Are you hungry?”
“Actually I just ate. Drinks?”
Teo looks up and scans the beach, Ocean Avenue, Santa Monica, then gets a mischievous look in his eye that makes him look like a teenager again.
“I got it. Come on,” he says, taking my hand, already leading me toward the pier.
A small part of me flares up at the familiar heat of his touch, wants to yank my hand back and kill his air of carefree easiness. To ask him once again why the hell he left, to tell him that it can’t be this easy to just forget what he did, that I won’t make it this easy. But so much more of me wants this.
“Oh no,” I say, laughing as we move closer to the boardwalk. “Are you seriously taking me where I think you’re taking me?”
Teo looks at me, still wearing that mischievous look.
“I just wanna know if you’re still a crack shot.”
I laugh, pushing up against him and hardly even noticing myself doing it.
“I told you, it’s all about watching other people shoot first, seeing how the gun’s misaligned and which one has the best air pressure or whatever.”
I flash back to when we were seventeen. I ached every moment I couldn’t see him, and though it made the brief, secretive meetings we had even sweeter, each one required the same amount of planning as an undercover military operation.
Sneaking off into the woods and following instructions like ‘left at the mound of walnuts caused by the hill, at the fallen tree covered in moss.’ Abandoned playground, the grim underpass, windows of time when our parents weren’t around, when we knew we’d be the only people in some place or other. Sometimes wearing hoodies and baggy clothes so people wouldn’t recognize me, joining so many after school clubs that tracing me to one was virtually impossible. I deleted so many messages from my phone that I wished I could keep (but remembered anyway) and our phone conversations were filled with so many code words they were almost a different language.
It was kind of romantic for a while. A secret that bonded us together, our love growing stronger for all it had to endure, for the difficulty we had to go through just to share it.
“Ooh,” I say, pointing at a stand. “You gonna get me some cotton candy?”
Teo shoots me an amused look even as he changes direction to head toward the stand.
“Thought you said you weren’t hungry?”
“I’m not. It’s just been a while since I had it.”
Teo’s eyes narrow a little and his half-smile gets a little more directed.
“That’s as good a reason as any.”
It was hard work though, hiding something so big. Having to cram so much we wanted to express, so much we wanted to share, into just a few stolen moments. Always looking over our shoulders. Living in two worlds, never overlapping. Holding back and never talking about this part of our lives that felt so natural at the dinner table, in between classes, or at the hangout. But what begins as romance can start to feel like a heavy burden when you have to keep hiding it.
More than anything, I remember just wanting to walk down the street with him, holding his hand. I wanted to stop at some place to eat, sitting at the tables with people around us. To laugh as loud as I wanted to, to relax and do what normal couples did.
“Strange how this place doesn’t ever seem to change that much,” I say, sucking down the sticky sweet pink and blue spun sugar as we stroll away from the stand.
“Why would it?”
We planned it for ages. A weekend away, just the two of us. Isabel helped me construct some story about how we were both going to go camping up north, and how it was somehow related to a school science project. Teo scrapped together some wages from odd jobs around town, and I used some birthday money for us to afford a small motel room and gas, and we went to L.A.
That first time felt like a dream. Scary and alien at first, until it went warm and satisfying, wonderful and perfect. I almost skipped beside him, the freedom of just being out with him a weight off my shoulders, making me feel physically lighter. The vivid colors and entrancing sounds of the pier made me feel more alive than I had anywhere else. We sat at a restaurant side-by-side and ate slowly, talking between every bite, our hands going to each other’s legs, leaning over to kiss tenderly when we couldn’t find anything more to say. Then we sat on the beach and watched the sunset, my head against his chest, his arm around my waist. I felt as happy as I ever had, knowing this was all I wanted, and as sad as I ever had, knowing that it wouldn’t last.
We went down to L.A. a couple of times after that, and each time was as good as the first, but coming home only got harder.
“Okay, killer,” Teo says, snatching my cotton candy from me and pointing at the midway booth. “Time to show me if you’ve still got it.”
I look at the shooting stand. It’s one of those where you have to shoot out the red star on a sheet of paper. There are three BB guns—somebody’s already using the left, and the booth employee is standing over the middle one, making eye contact to beckon us over.
I suck the stickiness off my fingers, slow enough to give him a little show, eyes locked on him, and nod. Playful, innocent, but I know how dirty his mind is.
“Just figure out which toy you want,” I say with a wink, and move toward the rightmost gun.
Teo lays five bucks down and I peer at the stand worker as he loads the BBs, making sure he doesn’t short me.
“Here you go, sir,” the stand worker says, offering the gun to Teo.
He laughs gently. “The lady’s gonna do my shooting for me,” he says.
It takes the stand worker a second to understand—too long, so I take the gun from him, and while he’s still looking befuddled, raise the gun and aim. I’m slow, patient—squeezing off only a few rounds at a time—not aiming for the red, but around the star, cutting it out point by point.
“God damn,” Teo mutters with appreciative awe, as the last of the star falls out with ammo to spare.
“Well how about that…” the stand worker says.
I lower the g
un and try not to look too smug.
“Your lady’s pretty dangerous,” the stand worker says, his smile a little forced now as he takes the gun from me. “You better treat her well.”
I turn a satisfied smile back to Teo, who doesn’t bother correcting him.
“So, what do you want?”
Teo’s still looking at me with a sense of bemused pride, then turns to study the fluffy toys at the back of the stand.
“Hmm…” he says, scratching his stubble. “Well, I gotta go for the goofy-looking dragon. Duke’s got a thing for dragons. You just made my dog very happy.”
The stand owner plucks the toy, hands it to me, and I give it to Teo, who nods at me with a grin, not even looking at the toy.
“Ok. Now you’ve got to win me something,” I challenge.
Teo laughs, then looks around at the other booths. His eyes fall on the game with the basketball hoops.
“Ok. Let’s go.”
A little while later we move away from the games, toward the end of the pier, feeling like Bonnie and Clyde. Teo holding his goofy dragon and me holding a stuffed lion.
Tempted by the baseball toss, Teo ends up winning a toddler-sized teddy bear.
“There you go,” he says, handing it over to me.
I laugh.
“I’m good with the lion,” I say, raising it. “What would I do with that? It’s huge!”
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” I say, still laughing a little. “I don’t have the space for it.”
Teo notices something behind me. I hear a wail, and I turn to look. There’s a little girl crying as she holds an empty ice cream cone, standing in front of a pink and green splat. Her mother tries to console her.
“Hold up,” Teo says, and I watch as he walks over to them.
He exchanges a few words with the mother, then lowers himself to the girl’s level, her face frozen in an expression of despair as he stands the teddy bear up. He nods the bear’s head, sticks the bear’s hand out, as if the bear’s talking, and a shy smile breaks out on the little girl’s face. He says something else, glances up at the mother, who nods, then the little girl opens her arms wide and takes the bear from Teo.